John Saul

John S. Saul was educated at the Universities of Toronto, Princeton and London and, on the ground, in Africa and has taught for many years both at York University (until his retirement) in Canada and in Africa: in Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. He also worked throughout these years as a liberation support and anti-apartheid activist, notably with the Toronto Committee for the Liberation of Southern Africa (TCLSAC) and with Southern Africa Report magazine. He had published over seventeen books including: Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in Southern Africa, Development after Decolonization: Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in a New Imperial Age, Recolonization and Resistance: Southern Africa in the 1990s, and O Marxismo-Leninismo no Contexto Moçambicano. He remains committed to an anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist politics.

\
  • On Building a Social Movement

    The North American Campaign for South African Liberation

    By John Saul     June 2016

    “In his characteristically engaging conversational style, combining intimate first-hand knowledge and lightly-worn scholarship with strong opinions, John Saul takes the reader vividly into the heart of the Canadian and American movements that supported the anti-apartheid and liberation struggles in southern Africa.” — Colin Leys, co-editor, The Socialist Register

  • Decolonization and Empire

    Contesting the Rhetoric and Reality of Resubordination in Southern Africa and Beyond

    By John Saul     September 2008

    What does Empire mean today? There is the unalloyed working of capitalism, the manufacture and exacerbation of a global hierarchy, reinforced by the “free” workings of the market, creating unequal windows of opportunity and material outcomes. The gap between rich and poor continues to grow, not exclusively along geographical lines (there are, after all, many poor in the global North and some rich in the global South) yet, nonetheless, principally along these lines. This hierarchy is only in part self-creating and self-sustaining. It is also willed and locked into place by the states, the governments in power of the North and their quasi-international panoply of institutions (the imf, the World Bank, the WTO and the like). The space for quasi-left experimentation in the South has gone now and capitalist practitioners face only a weak opposition. What does this mean for those at its receiving end, those in a global South? Those increasingly unable to defend themselves against the “free global market” as projected upon them by the us, the imf, the wto. What else is this, if not recolonization?

  • Development After Globalization

    Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in a New Imperial Age

    By John Saul     January 2006

    This reflection on the situation in the countries of the global South examines their shared but diverse experiences of the hard facts of poverty and exclusion in the world of capitalist globalization. It probes the reality of ‘underdevelopment’ in an unequal world, driven by western power and capitalist profit-seeking and supported by inequalities within the countries of the ‘third world’ themselves. John Saul suggests fresh ways to consider the dynamics of this situation and seeks to rethink the ways of linking a class-based struggle with the progressive demands of gender equality and identity politics.